Hi, Friends. As always, it’s great to be able to engage with you again. I am writing to you from the splendorous, wooded and verdant French town of Gif sur Yvette, and I wanted to take this opportunity to address aspects of data for an audience beyond the interests of data management and architecture people.

There is confusion about some of the fundamental aspects of business data, and there shouldn’t. If we strip away all of the boloney, it’s a subject that is quite approachable. In short, ‘it is not rocket surgery’. Continue reading →

I am a data architecture and management professional. For more than three decades I have been acquiring knowledge and experience in the design and delivery of effective data and solutions architectures for a wide range of projects and in a wide range of (mainly large global or regional) enterprise clients.

Therefore I think I can reasonably presume to have built up quite a good personal body of knowledge when it comes to applied data architecture and management.

As well as being a professional in the management and architecture of data, I have also considerable knowledge and experience in the areas of information management, artificial intelligence and knowledge management (structured intellectual capital).

The 4th big data bullshit is here, and it is completely reimagining the way we conceptualise, think and reason. This amazingly and imaginary Govesque world is driven by hyperbole and mendacity distributed via interconnected digital devices that are capable of amassing and fermenting ever-growing amounts of big data bullshit.

“Our discreditable secret is that we don’t know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don’t care that we don’t.”

― Dylan Thomas

Let me explain

I read a poster the other, it read “How To Turn Internal User Data Into Revenue”. It was one of those Facebook or LinkedIn hooks, you know, the ones used to get people to spend precious time on useless pursuits.

It reminded me of a book that my mother-in-law bought for my partner, many, many moons ago. “How to make a mint whilst you snooze”, or some such wacky title.

Relief from all of this is just be around the corner, in the shape of the next revolutionary inflection point in IT. Yes, as you might have guessed it by now. I am talking about data-less apps. Continue reading →

Taking a Pop at Traditional Data Warehousing

Pitch: I recently read a report from a data visualisation company on the “Top Ten Big Data Trends for 2017”. This is what they told me “Hadoop is no longer just a batch-processing platform for data-science use cases. It has become a multi-purpose engine for ad hoc analysis. It’s even being used for operational reporting on day-to-day workloads—the kind traditionally handled by data warehouses.” Continue reading →

HERE’S A THOUGHT! In the past age of big iron, the only reason for not having a proliferation of duplicated databases was the prohibitively high cost of disk storage. Now, we can let our database collections grow ‘like Topsy’. This is the Brave New World of data… apparently…

Let’s, for one moment, be the fly-guy on the corporate wall. What are we picking up on the radar there, Enda? Oh, yes…